In Altadena, immigrant workers, volunteers clean up soil for future community garden

The one-year anniversary of the Eaton fire found day laborers from the Pasadena Community Job Center still in the thick of what they were doing 365 days ago: rebuilding after the deadly blaze.

But they’re also battling another fire, that of ongoing raids from U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers.

Standing in a cleared Altadena lot set to become a community garden, Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) said Friday that both challenges won’t prevent immigrants and those who support them from showing up.

“Rebuilding will happen, and it is impossible to do it without migrant labor,” Alvarado said. “Yet while our labor is welcomed, our rights are not respected. Workers moved from fire to ICE. You cannot call on immigrant workers to rebuild while terrorizing them at the same time.”

About 50 jornaleros, or day laborers, volunteered to work alongside members of several groups, such as the Fire Poppy Project, DENA Soil Project, Community Compound, SoilWise, Evolve Altadena, and Metabolic Studio, all calling for full protections for workers doing remediation, accountability from insurance companies, and an immediate end to immigration enforcement in disaster-impacted communities.

Such enforcement began in earnest in June in Los Angeles County, as federal immigration agents began raiding hubs of immigrant labor, from Home Depots to car washes. Trump administration officials have said the raids are vital to deporting to what they say are the worst criminals who are immigrants. But in many communities, the raids have only sparked fear, concern and anger.

“When the disaster happened and ICE raids operation began, the administration said that they would not carry out raids in the areas adjacent to the disaster zones. And as we know, they lied,” Alvarado said.

Artist and educator Leigh Adams, 75, welcomed the clean-up brigade to the cleared lot that once contained her home, studio, a rental unit as well as a regenerative garden she tended for 15 years.

Adams will rebuild a smaller home on the site so that a community garden can be established there. The future Altadena Earth Commons hopes to teach people about bioremediation and how native plants, water harvesting and soil building can grow an almost hands-free garden.

Adams, also a horticulturist, showed off four amaranth plants she was gifted from Guatemala that only bloomed after the fire that, “popped up like dancing ladies with plumes and then they spread that seed all over here, and not only pulls lead and selenium out of the ground but are also good for the birds and insects.”

“This is what the land knows how to do, and we can teach how to do that and support that,” she added, decrying ICE raids and the shooting of Renee Gold in Minnesota as “unjust and spine-curdling cruelty.”

“It is only through immigrant labor that I will have a home, it’s time to join forces to resist what is unconscionable,” Adams said.

Enji Chung of Pasadena, co-founder of the Fire Poppy Project and the DENA Soil Project, said rebuilding Altadena is resistance, “both about our physical reconstruction and an affirmation of a future that includes all of our people, disabled, renter, elder, immigrant worker, and the land. We know we face a daunting challenge with the ongoing health risks workers and residents alike face without comprehensive cleanup.”

The day before the garden cleanup, on Thursday, Jan. 8, NDLON and job center staff, as well as students from Loyola High School in Los Angeles, drove around Altadena handing out backpacks with personal protection equipment such as helmets, goggles, suits, and safety vests, equipment for cleanup and remediation.

The Loyola High students are spending three weeks at the job center as part of their Senior Service Project, where they immerse themselves in community service. So far, that has included doing yard work, setting up for a food bank and cross-checking paperwork.

“Stuff that’s tedious but very important,” Lorenzo O’Neil, 18, of Pasadena, said of that last job.

Giving out the backpacks to construction and day workers in Altadena on Thursday, sharing tamales with them was eye-opening, they said.

“There was a sort of awkwardness the first time, then after the second or third time, we sort of were more comfortable just saying, ‘Take it,’ and we offer them food and it’s very nice,” O’Neil said.

Daniel Contreras, 18, of Newport Beach, came away with a deeper appreciation of what day laborers deal with every day.

“Everyone deserves the right to have a safe environment to work in, and the materials that we were handing out really just helped with that, because there are a lot of people that get taken advantage of, especially in the labor workforce and, even more so if they’re undocumented,”’ Contreras said. “So these tools helped them and it was really nice to distribute all of these things that would benefit them, if it doesn’t make their jobs easier, it makes it safer for sure.”

Walter Kibler, 18, of Los Angeles, admitted receiving a backpack full of personal protective equipment may not sound too exciting to a high school student.

“But it seemed like they really appreciated it, so I liked seeing them having a good time,” he said. “All the workers who came out, it seemed like it actually made a difference to them.”

For Jose Madera, director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, support from high school students, as well as community advocates, coming in the wake of his arrest and release on Jan. 7, after he followed an ICE agent in Pasadena, is a powerful statement.

“Only the village saves the village because we take care of each other,” Madera said. “When you love something, when you love someone, you protect them in every way you can, and that’s why we’re here. To protect each other. And this home, which experienced a lot of pain, which burned down, we’re here to heal it.”